Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s controversial Lost Girls is now in one single hardcover volume, going for roughly half the price of the now out-of-print purple behemoth you probably struggled with on the tube. They haven’t shrunk the pages they’ve just stuck ‘em all in one nice cloth-bound, dust-jacketed block that will only break your toe if you drop it and not your whole foot. If you’ve somehow unbelievably and rather shamefully missed the furore and never set eyes on the thing, Top Shelf have put up 12-page preview for you. But mind how you go: there are (gasp!) willies in it.More Moore? The Captain Britain by Alan Moore & Alan Davis Omnibus HC should do it, particularly if you’re upset over the ongoing series being canned. Captain Britain and the MI 13 #15 is going to be the last one you’ll see, and it’s supposed to show up next week. This omnibus is the first time the Moore/Davis run has been reprinted in total for the first time and there’s piles of it – 680 pages of the stuff! Over at the Mindless Ones they theorise that perhaps it was the lack of bad 80s hair that led to the demise of the current series.

Last week we had also Moore’s Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? in hardcover so it’s only fitting that Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? HC should follow suit. His two-part ‘love letter to Batman’ is here, obviously, along with some other Gaiman/Batman stuff DC have rounded up: Gaiman’s Poison Ivy story in Secret Origins #36 (with Mark Buckingham), his whimsical secret origin of The Riddler in Secret Origins Special #1, and his Joker story in Batman: Black & White #2, illustrated by Simon Bisley. If you didn’t pick up the Caped Crusader story as it came out there’s a review here with lots of pages of Andy Kubert’s lovely artwork.

All Select Comics #1 70th Anniversary Special is worth a look this week not just for the Mark Guggenheim (Amazing Spider-Man) and the brilliant Javier Pulido (Robin: Year One, and Human Target) 1940s heroine Blonde Phantom noir piece (talked about here), but also for the bonus story by Michael Kupperman of Gosh! Favourite Tales Designed to Thrizzle. Kupperman takes on Marvex, the existentialist Super-Robot from the early days of Marvel who would undress in each story to show women he couldn’t date them on account of his being a robot. Kupperman promises to take it up a notch and Marvex will get his kit of twice. His first Thrizzle collection came out last week and because we like it so much we got in loads. And we still have some.

Another Gosh! Favourite is Black Jack creator Osamu Tezuka. This week sees the release of his adult-y series Swallowing the Earth, the story of an icy seductress called Zephyrus and a perpetually drunken sailor. Tezuka re-used some of the same characters in different stories so you’ll probably recognise some from the Buddha books. More of that kind of talk and a summary of the manga master’s career here and a preview here.

Blackest Night starts this week with Geoff Johns’ Blackest Night #1 (of 8), Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #1 (of 3), plus a tie-in Titans issue you might want to pick up. Geoff Johns talks about the series here. Speaking of Johns, his Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes story that ran in Action Comics #858-863 is collected in trade-paperback and reviewed here. Andrew highly recommends it too.

This week’s issue of Walking Dead has its usual bevy of zombies but as an added bonus it also has the entirety of Chew #1, which is a series causing quite a buzz. We didn’t order enough Chew #1 and then got lots of people asking for it. This must have happened everywhere, because its writer John Layman says…

“As a creator, there's nothing more satisfying than hearing that a lot of people are interested in reading your book. The flip side of this is there's nothing more frustrating than hearing how people can't get a hold of your book to read. So, Image and Robert Kirkman concocted this great plan to put Chew in a lot of people hands – and for the unbeatable low, low price of 'free'."

That said, the free preview’s in black and white so if you like it you may very well want to kick yourself (or us) for missing Rob Guillory’s colour artwork. Fear not! There’s second printings of issues #1-3 in the post. They should be with us in early August.

In non-shop news, the Kevin O’Neill exhibition at the Illustration Cupboard that I mentioned a while ago is on now! Apparently Moore and Pat Mills turned up at the opening last night and we’ve heard very good things about it.

Also, over at Panel BordersAlex Fitch talks to small press creator Paul Rainey about his comic There’s No Time Like the Present:

TNTLTP tells the story of a group of friends from Milton Keynes who suffer from the usual concerns of our generation – niche interests, unfulfilling jobs, difficulties with dating etc. – but in a world where time travel exists and the UK in the present day is a holiday vacation for patronising visitors from the future.